


Lost and found

by Mysecretfanmoments



Category: Final Fantasy X & Final Fantasy X-2, Final Fantasy X-2
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-11
Updated: 2016-05-11
Packaged: 2018-06-07 17:07:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6814657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mysecretfanmoments/pseuds/Mysecretfanmoments
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She sat up and watched the waves; her eyes grew tired. They had almost shut when she heard footsteps in the sand behind her. For a moment she smelled Macalania Woods around her, floral and bright, and she felt the weight and texture of her summoner’s garb, conjured from memory like a Farplane-image. She didn’t have to turn to know who approached.</p><p>((Set after the good ending, Yuna tries to come to terms with the fact that Tidus is back.))</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost and found

**Author's Note:**

  * For [foreverautumn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/foreverautumn/gifts).



> To all the people who love FFX as much as I do: thank you for being on this feelings journey alongside me these past 10 years. Jacki: thank you for always being one of the funniest people I know (who incidentally also can't get enough of FFX). This one's for you.

It took a long time to explain everything. It took hours of Tidus getting over the fact that Wakka and Lulu had had a _baby_ , and hours of Rikku stumbling over words as she tried to tell him the good bits first, and hours of Paine’s wry interruptions, and in all those hours Yuna still couldn’t quite believe it. Whenever her eyes met Tidus’s across the room she felt a thrill—and then she glanced around at their companions, just to make sure they saw him too. They clearly did, but she still couldn’t believe it.

She wasn’t sure how she felt. Happy. Nervous. Scared. Most of all, she was scared to wake up—to look up and realize she’d been indulging a fantasy and he’d never come back at all. She wanted to be over there next to him holding his hand, and for a while she _had_ clung tight, but it was too much. Holding him was no less scary than being across the room from him, and no less dreamlike.

“We should go to bed,” Lulu said at last, though her eyes were still overbright whenever she looked at Tidus. She motioned at Wakka. “We don’t get enough sleep as it is.”

“We should all sleep,” Yuna said, standing. They were intruding; this tent belonged to a new family, even if it was the same tent she’d spent much of her life in. “Rikku, Paine and I will go back to the ship.”

Her companions glanced at her, and she had the strangest sense of déjà vu. For just a moment, it felt as if she were a young summoner on her pilgrimage once more, on a quest to beat Sin. Her companions all glanced at her—but they didn’t comment. Her decisions were law.

Except they weren’t. Didn’t her friends remember? Sin was gone. They were allowed to disagree with her, and question her, and tell her she was being silly, yet none of them spoke a word. None of them asked _don’t you want Tidus with you?_

“I’ll see you tomorrow?” That was Tidus, and his voice broke her heart. So familiar, and yet she’d grown unused to it. It was like hearing her father on the spheres they’d found on her pilgrimage: a voice from the past.

Tidus could be reached, though. He wasn’t an old message, prerecorded and left as a memento for her to find. Why would she leave him alone for even a second? How could she be so ungrateful?

 _Because I need time to think_ , she thought. Tidus was real now, not a fantasy. Bringing him back had been the right thing to do, she knew for sure—but was clinging to him and pretending nothing had changed right? Two years had passed for him in the blink of an eye; wouldn’t anyone need time to process that?

“Of course,” Yuna answered after a too-long pause, smiling her summoner’s smile. There were questions in Tidus’s face, but she didn’t know how to answer them yet. She didn’t look at him again as they took their leave, telling herself Lulu and Wakka would take care of Tidus just like they always had. It shamed her to walk away, but shame was better than this restless confusion.

The silence was thick on the way back to the beach, heavy with humid island air. Rikku was the first to break it.

“Is something wrong, Yunie?”

Her voice was tentative; Yuna took her time responding.

“No,” she said at last. An insect call trilled in the night air. “But as far as he knows, we just beat Sin. He just gave up his life so the fayth could be free—but two years went by without him. How is he meant to come to terms with all that in just one night?”

Her shoulders curved under the weight of Paine and Rikku’s stares.

“I didn’t leave him to deal with it alone,” she said, defensive. She glanced at both of them—did they always have to walk on either side of her?—and added heatedly, “Wakka was always close with him. Sometimes it’s easier for friends to—”

“We weren’t accusing you,” Paine said. Rikku nodded. “We were wondering how you were handling it.”

“Oh,” Yuna said. “I don’t know. I was thinking I’d sit on the beach for a while. Think it over, you know.”

“Alone?” Rikku asked.

Yuna nodded.

“But you’re happy, right?” Rikku’s voice was unsure. “You seemed happy this afternoon.”

“I’m happy,” Yuna said, and her friends relaxed. The rest of the journey passed in slightly more comfortable silence. When they reached the beach, Paine and Rikku left her in favor of returning to the ship, Rikku hugging her quickly before jogging away. Yuna sat down in the sand, facing the waves—and then she let herself fall back and gaze up at the stars.

Today had been unreal, she decided. There had been many unreal days in her life—when she found out her father was never coming home, when they fought Yunalesca, when she woke up and knew she was no longer a summoner—but those days had been unreal in a way that drew shadows up around the unreality. They’d been spent in a haze of sadness and confusion, caught up in the losses she’d suffered for the greater good.

Today, for the first time, a day had been unreal because of a gain instead of a loss.

Above her, the stars winked down indifferently. Stars could last and last, unlike humans. They lived far away from each other, caught in their solitary orbits.

She could walk back to Besaid Village and touch Tidus right now.

The pinprick stars above grew indistinct as minutes lengthened into what felt like hours. Perhaps she slept. She was aware of her eyes being open at times and closed at others. The sand was grainy beneath her, and the lights in the sky sometimes swirled. It was dizzying.

She sat up and watched the waves; her eyes grew tired again. They had almost shut when she heard footsteps in the sand behind her. For a moment she smelled Macalania Woods around her, floral and bright, and she felt the weight and texture of her summoner’s garb, conjured from memory like a Farplane-image. She didn’t have to turn to know who approached.

“You found me,” she said. She glanced at Tidus, loving the familiar, tentative look on his face. Had she wanted him to come?

“I wasn’t sure you wanted me to look.”

She ducked her head. “Neither was I.”

Had he slept? He seemed calm as he sat down beside her, placing his arms around his drawn-up knees and staring out at the waves. He didn’t seem like a person newly back from the dead and reeling with it.

“Don’t you need time?” she asked.

“Time for what?”

“To… get used to things. For you, Sin was—”

“—yesterday. I know. You said so a few times.”

“But you don’t feel like that? You said you didn’t remember a thing from the time you were gone.”

“I don’t,” he said. “But Sin doesn’t exactly feel like yesterday either.”

“Oh.”

He looked at her. “It doesn’t feel like two years, though. To me, you’re still—” He swallowed.

“I’m still what?”

“Home.”

“Even the me now?” _Not the girl you left on the ship?_

“I want to know the you now,” he said. “There’s no you I don’t want to know.”

“Can you believe I did all the things we told you about today?”

He grinned. “Yeah. I wish I could have seen it though. Superstar Yuna.”

“A bit like you and your Zanarkand Abes.” It was something she’d thought after her concert on the Thunderplains: _how did you feel when you were performing in front of people?_ She could ask him all those things now, all the things she’d wondered about him.

“I don’t think playing a sport and signing a few balls really compares,” he said. He gazed at her, and it was the same yearning gaze she remembered, but something new had crept into it.

She couldn’t identify the _something new_ yet, but she wanted to.

“I’ve missed you,” she said, and wasn’t surprised when her eyes burned and spilled tears. She let them fall, making no move to catch them. “There was no reason to think you’d ever come back.”

“It sounds like…” He stopped, unsure.

“What?”

“Well, your stories—they all start a year ago. You gave a speech in Luca, and then Rikku showed you a sphere of that guy. But a year passed between those two things, right? I’ve been gone for two, and according to—”

“You’re right,” she interrupted, not needing her story rehashed once more. “I was in Besaid for a year. I was in mourning, I suppose. Back then, I really had no hope. I thought I could live on small happinesses. I thought I owed that to you.”

Tidus was swallowing. Was he close to tears, or did she just imagine that?

“A lot of people offered to marry me,” she said to brighten the mood. She made sure to smile as she said it.

“Any likely candidates?”

“Hm. No. Even if there had been, I wasn’t ready.”

 “And now?”

She looked at him, marveling at how close he was. If she reached out, she could grab hold of him. Two years ago she had been used to his warm presence beside her; she had relied on him being there, and the sudden loss of him had torn her apart. Two years was a long time.

“I don’t think we can just continue where we left off,” she said in a rush. “Everything’s different. We don’t have to save the world anymore. But…”

Tidus looked hopeful.

“I think we can still try,” she said. Her hands clenched. “I want to try. What about you?”

She was glad of his silence, nervous as it made her. She couldn’t have trusted a reply that came too quickly. After a long moment—waves lapped the shore ten times, she counted—Tidus finally answered.

“I want to,” he said. “You’re still the part of Spira that makes sense to me. You and the others. I don’t need you to be the same person you were back then. I like the new you, I think.”

“You don’t want to explore on your own?”

He looked up at the stars. “I guess it’d be nice not to feel like a foreigner in the only world that actually exists. But that’ll come with time. I don’t need to explore anywhere yet. I don’t need some solo pilgrimage. I’m just happy I’m not actually dead. I thought I would be.”

She wasn’t sure what to say to that.

“I saw—I thought I saw my dad. When I jumped. Auron, your dad, my dad. Isn’t that crazy?”

Something in Yuna’s stomach clenched with fear. It wasn’t crazy, but it was scary. Who really knew the mysteries of the Farplane?

“Tidus…”

“It’s okay! I’m over it.”

“You were so brave,” she said. She couldn’t look at him.

“Who wouldn’t be, with you as an example all that time?”

She reached for him then, her hand colliding with his arm. He unfolded for her, and she drew near, curling into him. He was still seventeen, exactly the same as the boy she’d lost. Seventeen seemed so out of reach, so young, and yet there was age in Tidus too: years that had crept in even before the end of their journey. She hadn’t noticed them at the time.

“It’s hard, right?” Tidus said, though his voice was bright. “Finding out my dad was still alive sucked too, in its way.”

She gasped. “It doesn’t suck!”

He laughed. Had he meant to draw that out of her? Now they were looking at each other, side-by-side in the sand, his arm almost around her, and when the mirth in his expression dimmed she felt the same tugging she’d known two years ago.

Was that tugging love? Or attraction? She’d been so young when she fell in love with him, and convinced her life would end at seventeen; was that something to build on?

“I know I saw you more recently than you saw me,” he said, touching her cheekbone, “But I missed you.”

“Because you like making fun of me?” she asked, narrowing her eyes for effect.

“It’s a factor,” he said. His hand moved to hold her face more firmly, but then he pulled back, wiping it on his knee.

“Sand, sorry—”

She didn’t let him finish the motion. His nervousness made him irresistible now in the same way his steadiness had made him irresistible two years ago. She pressed her lips to his, let her hands slide along his jaw until she was holding his face. She felt a shock travel through his body, and then he moved tentative hands to her sides, lightly at first and then bunching the material of her shirt, grip tight.

There was a drum inside of her, the beat picking up speed. It told her to pull him close, to climb on top of him and forget any and all reservations. _He’s alive_ , that drum said. _What are you waiting for?_

She ignored the frantic pulsing of desire, beat the impulse to push through her reservations and lose herself. She didn’t want to be lost; she was waiting to find something again, both in herself and in Tidus. The kiss remained innocent, insofar as the sliding of tongues and frantic gripping of clothes could be innocent. He smelled the same, somehow, beneath the salt smell of the ocean. It was a scent that would always remind her of joy snatched from the jaws of despair.

Was _that_ a basis for a life together?

Tidus pulled back first, breathing hard. His head was bowed, his grip loosening but not releasing. When he spoke, it wasn’t what she’d expected.

“I guess I still can’t take you on that date to Zanarkand,” he said.

It took a moment for her endorphin-flooded mind to make out the words, but when her brain caught up with his meaning she laughed, imagining a candlelit dinner among the monkeys.

“No,” she said. “Not unless you really like monkeys. There are a lot of them.”

“Thanks to you.”

She looked down, feeling his hands warm against her sides. He still hadn’t let go. “I couldn’t bear to see all those people there. It was my place. Mine and—well.”

“All the summoners?”

She nodded. Zanarkand had felt like an open wound to her, a place both holy and unholy. It wasn’t a tourist attraction. Those feelings had dulled in the wake of another journey, no longer so raw, but they probably wouldn’t leave her fully, not for as long as she lived.

“You’ve become like me,” Tidus said, grinning. “What about the rest of us? Wasn’t Zanarkand ours too?”

“Oh!” She thought for a moment. Wasn’t everything that was hers theirs anyway? The bond between summoner and guardian… She amended herself: “I didn’t mean it wasn’t yours.”

Tidus finally let her go, clasping his hands around his ankles and leaning in cheekily. “You say it’s your Zanarkand, but it’s my Zanarkand too!”

The somber mood dissolved as Yuna registered the falsetto tone and the fact that he was quoting her own words back at her. Well, loosely. _You say it’s your story_ … She _had_ become more like him. Willing to want things—to demand them, even, and own her desire for more. But hadn’t he become more like her in the end, too?

“Why are you always teasing me?” she asked, pretending to be annoyed again.

“Guardian’s privilege,” he said. “I give you devotion, you let me tease you. Or maybe I just want you to pay attention to me.”

“You remember I started this whole crazy quest because I saw a sphere of someone who looked like you, don’t you? I don’t think teasing is necessary.”

He smiled. His hand came up under her chin, tipping her face up. “All in the past. I need to earn your attention now.”

She met his gaze and saw the nervousness from earlier had fled. There was that steadiness again, and interest. He was searching her face for something, and she let herself search back. Stars winked down at them, waves crashed, and small, unseen things scuttled in sand and greenery.

“You were right,” he said softly, after a long while. “We’ll need time to get used to it.”

She hadn’t been thinking that. She’d been thinking how, in a year of constant courting by fawning suitors from all over Spira, there hadn’t been one person who made her feel as exquisite as he did.

“Not that much time,” she said. Her voice was low. “A night’s sleep, maybe.”

He stood decisively, and she blinked up at him in surprise; he reached a hand down for her. She took it, letting him pull her up, still baffled by the abrupt change of pace. Afterwards she stood still, waiting for him to lead to whatever place he’d suddenly thought of.

He waited too, the moment lengthening.

“Um—did you want us to go somewhere?” she asked.

“No. I want us to sleep.”

She waited again, and he gestured, beginning to pace.

“If we sleep, it’ll be tomorrow, and then we’ll be used to it. Or more used to it.” His pacing stopped. “Then we can start again.”

She smiled at his tone: Tidus in excited explaining mode. She nodded. “Okay.”

“Okay. I’m going back to Besaid. See you tomorr—”

He stopped when she grabbed his hand. “I never said we had to sleep in different places.”

“Uh,” was all Tidus had to say, struck dumb, his restless energy fading. Suddenly he was vulnerable, though she couldn’t say why. “I’d like that.”

There: that was the vulnerability. That look of longing, quickly covered by a nervous scratch at his cheek.

Yuna ached with sympathy, recognizing his insecurity. _Will he still love me?_ she’d asked herself when she began to consider that she might get him back. _Will he still want to touch me? If he loved someone else, could I bear it?_

It was Shuyin who’d loved someone else. Tidus loved her. Like before, he’d followed her and placed himself firmly at her side. Something inside of her was slotting back into place, or changing shape entirely. A future with Tidus, filled with teasing and nights on the beach and his excited theorizing. She could handle that, she thought; she’d handled much worse.

“Let’s go, then,” she said, pulling him along. Their feet swished in the sand, and after a moment she noticed him matching her steps, the way she’d matched hers to his. He smiled at her sheepishly when he saw he’d been caught.

A future with Tidus, with his silliness and his excitement, with the quiet, thoughtful nature that underpinned it all. She could handle that very well.


End file.
